Szíjártó Kálmán is an artist and a member of the Pécsi Műhely group from Pécs.
Starting with the enamel works, which are one of the foundational works of the Pécsi Műhely group, Kálmán moved to more conceptual works using actions, photography and photomontage. In the early 1980s, he extended his practice to animation.
Milan Adamčiak was a conceptual artist who was a performer, composer, and musicologist. He is considered one of the most important representatives of Fluxus in former Czechoslovakia.
He graduated in cello at the Conservatory in Žilina, and then musicology at the Faculty of Philosophy in Bratislava, where he later taught. In the mid-1960s, he started making new music.
In 1965, during a visit to Warsaw, he had the opportunity to participate in happenings, which opened the door for him to collaborate with John Cage, who in 1992 invited him to Perugia to join in his production. He also researched 20th–century music and the connection between music and fine arts.
He was a member of various art groups, and in 1989 he founded the Transmusic comp – an ensemble of unconventional music. In 1990, with Július Koller and Peter Rónai, he founded the New Seriousness art group and launched the FIT – Festival of Intermedia Creativity (Bratislava, 1991 and 1992). Since 2005, he has collaborated with Michal Murin on the social project Altruism as Arttruism.
Józef Robakowski is one of the most notable experimental film creators. He creates photographic series, installations, drawings, objects, and conceptual projects and teaches and publishes text on art theory.
Robakowski co-founded the artistic collectives Oko (1960), Zero-61 (1961-69), and Krąg (1965-67). From 1970, he co-organised the Workshop of Film Form in Łódź.
He has run the initiative of the Exchange Gallery since 1978, in which he offers space for exchanging artistic through and exhibiting works, collecting films and documentation. The Exchange Gallery is also a contact office for the international artistic movement INFERMENTAL.
Some of his noteworthy video works are the 1973 work Ide, an analytical video work of his climbing metal stairs, or Z mojego okna from 1978, in which he follows the development of his surroundings from the viewpoint of his apartment window. Also intriguing is the film Ryznek from 1970, the first film Robakowski produced with the Workshop of Film Form, in which he modified the speed of the tape to produce a different view of reality.
He wrote various manifestos, such as the Calling Once Again for Pure Film from 1971, which goes in hand with the philosophy of the Workshop of the Film Form, in which they focus on making the language of film simpler and information denser, removing narration and different literary forms.
Marijan Molnar is a post-conceptual artist and one of the participants in the New Art Practice in Zagreb. In his works, he prefers artistic nomadism, which, with time, started including new technology. He combines painting, installations, video, ambients, public actions, photography, and site-specific and online installations.
After painting over with black his drawings created in Academy, from 1977 to 1983, he was occupied with the philosophical meaning of the system of elements: earth, water, fire, and air, which he questions with actions such as Earth and Fire (1977), Burning of Paper on Snow (1977). At that time, he dealt with the relationship of culture and nature, for example, with the action Artist’s Daily Meal, as well as the limits of, e.g. paper and gallery – Artwork’s Frame (1978) – and the boundaries of body and space, as in the performance Three Relations Body/Environment (1978).
For the Democratization of Art is a series of works started in 1979 with an action to get signatures for the democratization of art at the then Republic Square in Zagreb. In his works, he questions the topic of absence, being open or closed, and indifference. He collaborated with the artists around the Podrum Gallery and PM Gallery in Zagreb.
Vlado Martek is a conceptual artist and poet. In the mid-seventies in Zagreb, together with Mladen and Sven Stilinović, Fedor Vučemilović, Boris Demur and Željko Jerman, he founded and was a member of the Group of Six Authors. They were among the first who had performed and exhibited their works in public spaces and dealt with the deconstruction of the Socialist ideology in Yugoslavia.
Martek called himself a pre-poet, and his work pre-poetry. That became the definition of his artistic practice. His works are actions, exhibition-actions in cooperation and communication with the audience on the streets and in public spaces. He creates works and anti-works, agitations, assemblages, and texts-diagrams written and drawn by hand. The fundamental feature of his work is the transmedial linking of language and visual arts in drawings, photographs, objects, paintings, actions, performances and installations. Martek has remained active in his primary field of philosophy and literature and has published numerous artists’ books, self-published books and books of texts, which he considers a form of social activism. In addition to writing in the traditional sense, Martek creates poetic objects in which he connects the media of literature, philosophy and fine arts.
Bućan’s work on the ex-Yugoslav art scene took place within the New Art Practice of the 70s and 80s of the 20th century. His works are linked to conceptual and Pop-Art. In the late 1960s, he made urban actions and interventions on the streets of Zagreb.
His series He created the Bucan Art in 1972. In the centre of these works was the word “art”, with colours and typographies characteristic of the logos of recognizable national and multinational companies and media houses. With its own language and pop aesthetics in the “branding” process of art and artist itself, Bućan turns to the criticism of the market system, using the re-appropriation of formal and stylistic determinants of advertising posters and logos. By this appropriation, Bućan created a new position for art in general, his art and himself.
He also did graphic design. The most prominent are his posters, concerts, exhibitions and other events. With his unconventional approach, he strongly influenced the design of his period and future generations
Lászlo Kerekes was a conceptual artist and a member of the Bosch+Bosch Group. From 1993 he was an active member of the Artists’ Museum movement initiated by Emmett Williams.
In the first half of the 1970s, Kerekes’ art was based on actions and interventions related to land art. When Lake Palić near Subotica was drained in 1972, he made “landscape corrections” by placing strips in the bottom of the lake or writing in chalk signs (numbers, mathematical signs, lines, arrows) defined according to his own coordinate system. At the same time, his activities included mail art, xeroxed electrography, experimental film and actions inspired by Fluxus.
In 2005 he introduced a wide-angle digital camera obscura suitable for art photography, which he had not only invented but also engineered. On his fiftieth birthday in 2004, he symbolically withdrew from public appearances as an artist.
Bálint Szombathy is a multimedia artist, art historiographer, literary writer, editor and researcher of beauty. He is one of the founding members of the Bosch+Bosch Group.
In 1970, he made his first drawings representing the ball’s path by tracing television broadcasts of soccer games – Footballogram, 1971. In the 1980s, he introduced the medium of phototelegraphy (wire-photo) in visual arts.
The main characteristics of his ample and continuously growing oeuvre are intermediality and the combination of genres. The fundamental elements of Szombathy’s activity are its referentiality to the poetic experimentalism of the classical avant-garde and the endorsement of the critical attitude of activism. The significance of activism and ideological criticism in his works was already visible in his two anti-war actions in 1968; however, it was not until the early 1970s that he began to pursue activities exhibiting systematically subversive thought. The first instance of using ideological symbols and objects was in his outdoor action Flags in 1971, which also marked the beginning of the intensive involvement of photography in his creative process.
His two emblematic series were conceived immediately after Flags. His photo performance Bauhaus from 1972 symbolically placed one of the pivotal institutions of the avant-garde into his personal living space. As opposed to this, Lenin in Budapest focused on the Hungarian context. Due to its public nature, this action raised utterly different questions, revisiting the 1956 revolution and subsequent Soviet intervention or the events of 1968.
Slavko Matković was one of ex-Yugoslavia’s most prominent conceptual artists. He was the founder of the Bosch+Bosch Group in Subotica in 1969.
The ideas and the creative process were often more important to him than the documented result. Matković created conceptual projects, mail art, comics, performances, body art actions, collages, experimental films, mail art and photographic projects. He was the editor of samizdats Kontaktor 972 (1972) and Pesmos (1972) as well as of WOW (1974), the periodical of the Bosch+Bosch Group.
His project of Imprinted Surfaces started in 1973, and it included not only his imprints/cancellation of the surfaces (A4-size paper sheets, with two intersecting straight lines), but also other artists at the 4th April Meetings in Belgrade in 1974, including Joseph Beuys, Marina Abramović, Braco Dimitrijević, Raša Todosijević, Ilija Šoškić and many others.
He also took on artistic performance, performing at several Central and Eastern European festivals in the 1980s and 1990s. In his last years, he designated everyday actions such as reading or thinking about art as performance.
The BOSCH+BOSCH group was founded in 1969 in Subotica by Slavko Matković (Subotica, 1948 – 1994). The group’s name idea came from combining the last name of the painter Hieronymous Bosch, and the name of the West German technological giant Bosch – which they perceived as a signifier of the modern, technological era in which new media needed to be used to achieve one’s (artistic) goals. The group was active until 1976, and the artists continued to create individually.
This multi-national group’s work (with members of Hungarian, Serbian, and Croatian descent) can be interpreted in the line of New artistic practices in ex-Yugoslav art. Bálint Szombathy (Pačir, 1950), László Szalma (Subotica, 1948 – 2004) were in the group since its beginning. During 1971 László Kerekeš (Stara Moravica, 1942 – Berlin, 2001) joined, and respectively Katalin Ladik (Novi Sad, 1942) and Attila Csernik (Bačka Topola, 1941) joined in 1973 and Ante Vukov (Subotica, 1955 – 2012) in 1975. The group’s activity took place in the borderline space of Subotica, which is in the border areas of Central Europe and the border area of the Balkans, in a political sense, the outskirts of Eastern Europe. Subotica is a city where, shockingly and incompatibly, Hungarian, Serbian and Croatian cultures meet in their heterogeneous, dispersed and decentralized forms.
Members of the BOSCH+BOSCH group quickly abandoned the pure linguistic (analytic) conceptualism (reism) which was characteristic of the early work of the Slovenian OHO or Novi Sad’s KOD group.
The work of BOSCH+BOSCH deals with abandoning the traditional means of textual representation (pen-paper-book) by approaching the textuality of gestures and thus forming new visual consciousness – the visual experience in the spirit of Arte povera and land art.
The group’s artistic work unfolded in the dominion of spatial interventions, land art, Arte povera, mixed media, project art, conceptual art, visual semiology, new comic, mail art etc. Certain members, parallel with their practical artwork, developed as theorists and art critics (Slavko Matković, Bálint Szombathy). Members of the group exhibited together alongside members of Hungarian Avant-Garde, and kept vigorous correspondence (mail art) with Fluxus members (especially Matković and Szombathy).